There’s a classic Yogi Berra-style Jewish joke that goes something like this:

A woman walks into her local butcher shop and sees a sign for chicken at $1.50 a pound. (Note: You can tell just how old this joke is by the prices mentioned here.) She looks at the butcher indignantly and says, “A dollar-fifty? The butcher across the street is selling chicken for only 30 cents a pound!”

The butcher shrugs and says, “Nu? Go buy it from him.”

“I can’t,” the woman replies. “He’s out of stock.”

The butcher smiles and says, “Lady, when I’m out of chicken, I sell it for 10 cents a pound!”

One of the things that makes the joke work is the brutal honesty (perhaps it’s chutzpah) of the butcher. But deeper than that, I think, is that it brings into high relief the insincerity of the marketplace. After all, what does it mean to charge money for a product you don’t actually have? And yet, any of us who has ever bought something that turned out to be a fraud can probably relate. So we laugh at the joke because we can recognize something of ourselves in it.

On an even deeper level, I think the joke is going further and can take us to a place that might be helpfully understood by—wait for it—the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th century Jewish philosopher of language. 

A little refresher in case you haven’t thought about him recently (which is totally fine—most of us have probably had other things on our minds recently): One of the most famous aspects of Wittgenstein’s work is the change in his thinking about language between his early and later periods. In his earlier thought, Wittgenstein posited that language should fundamentally work like a map: for a word or a sentence to mean something, you must be able to point to something that it’s trying to signify. When we can’t do that—for instance, if we’re talking about concepts like God or love—then there’s a gap between the signifier and the signified. At that point, we’re in the world of the mystical, and we should enter it through silence rather than speech.

Later in life, Wittgenstein came to the view that this focus on the concrete versus abstract was misguided, perhaps because these kinds of gaps are ever-present. Language rarely works perfectly like a map. A better way to understand it, he argued, was to think of it as a game, or collection of games. Words don’t have fixed, inherent meanings. Instead, they work based on the social rules of the context in which they’re deployed. For instance, “chicken” in the joke above means a kind of meat the woman wants to prepare. But “chicken” as uttered by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future (“Nobody calls me chicken!”) means something very different. His focus shifted from minding the gap between signifier and signified to swimming in the stream of language. 

Commenting on Moses’s self-assessment in Parashat Vaera that he is of “uncircumcised lips” (Ex. 6:12), Avivah Zornberg, invoking Nachmanides, observes, “There is no escape from the imperative of language, because only [Moses] has seen and heard. The burden of revelation lies directly on him: only he can speak of what he knows. This means a project of translation: he must make God’s words heard by others. This is the essential role of the prophet.” Yet, Zornberg continues, “To speak always means to translate, to transform; even the most faithful translations are betrayals: il traduttore e traditore—’To translate is to betray.'” (The Particulars of Rapture, 94)

“Translation” here does not mean merely expressing one idea in another language. Zornberg is saying something far deeper: translation is the basic act of communication itself, even within a language nominally shared by the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader. (For instance, at this very moment, though I’m quite sure you’re understanding the English I’m writing, I’m understandably concerned that you may not be getting what I’m trying to say!)

Zornberg goes on to analyze Moses as potentially wracked by a fear of shame inherent in speaking, “a fear of being despicable in the eyes of Pharaoh” (who was, she reminds us, a family figure to Moses). She sums him up at this stage as experiencing “a continuing resistance to language, to entering the world of others… resisting the embarrassments of language.” For this reason, God assigns Aaron, who has not directly experienced the revelation that Moses has, as a kind of press secretary to aid him in the work of translation and communication.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this challenge of language, the enormity of trying to express fully and honestly the totality of an experience or an idea, resonates deeply. I feel like I experience it all the time. Like the early Wittgenstein, I have found, especially in recent years, wisdom in the idea that it is often better to remain silent, particularly when speaking is likely to generate more heat than light. To speak or write these days, especially in public, always requires a high degree of trust: that one’s listeners or readers will engage in good faith; that our words will be given the benefit of the doubt (provided we are, in fact, communicating in good faith). That trust often requires a great deal of courage. And if Moses had a hard time mustering that courage, then I’m willing to be a little more compassionate with myself if I don’t rise to the bar.

And yet, as our tradition makes equally clear, the liberation of the Exodus is not merely a political one. The midrashic and Hasidic traditions make much of the idea that just as the Jewish people were in exile in Egypt, so was their language. The redemption was not only of Israelite bodies, but of our words, our Torah, our culture. As Zornberg, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, writes elsewhere, “Between silence and speech, silence is the more dangerous: its very safety endangers the self.” She sums up, “Between finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity, the human being struggles for an authentic freedom.” (15)

Particularly in an age when each of us has access to a megaphone, and when, despite countervailing forces, we still have deep connections to the idea of speaking out in the public square, these are more than academic or aesthetic ruminations. How and when we choose to speak, to listen, to engage with one another through our words—these are still the questions of the Exodus, and they are still the questions into which our spiritual practice is meant to help us live.

Questions for Reflection & Conversation:

When you think about “speaking up” these days, what sensations arise for you? What, if anything, do you find helps you speak when you might rather be silent? What, if anything, helps you be silent when you might have an urge to speak? 

Natalie has wanted to do this for a long time. All of her grandparents were survivors of the Shoah and/or Russian gulags during World War II. And while many folks are interested in tracing their genealogy, Natalie has always been particularly eager to gather as much of the stories of her lost relatives as possible–not just knowing their names, but who they were and how they lived. That’s what she’s helping other people to do too.

For one client, she has spent dozens of hours learning about the family’s history through archival records, and she has uncovered some amazing things: The names of lost aunts and uncles, and post-Shoah testimonies about the town they lived in; a footnote in a memorial volume that mentioned a cousin’s best friend; an oral history in which a survivor recalled that the way they used to evaluate whether a celebration was really great was by how good the sponge cake was.

What Natalie is doing with her clients is helping them push through some of the veil that historical narrative can place over the lived experience of our ancestors: Yes, bubbie’s citizenship was stripped by the Nuremberg Laws; she also made a fabulous sponge cake that used 16 eggs. In the former telling, Bubbie becomes something of a heroic symbol; in the latter, she was a woman who wasn’t so different from us. Both are important to know, remember, and relate to. (And one is much more delicious than the other.)

“And because the midwives revered God, God established households for them.” (Exodus 1:21) Shifra and Puah, who the midrash identifies as Yocheved and Miriam, Moses’s mother and sister, are heroic historical figures. Their resistance to Pharaoh is pivotal to the survival of Israelites–and because their story is retold in this way, they are symbols for all who resist tyranny and oppression.

But the language of “God established households for them” invites questions. What’s going on here? Rashi comments that the “households” refer to literal lineages: Yocheved becomes the ancestor of Moses and Aaron (and Miriam); Miriam, through her marriage to Caleb, becomes the ancestor of King David.

In his Mei Hashiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz offers a less historical, more spiritual reading: “It is human nature that when we fear other human beings, we don’t experience yishuv hada’at, a settled mind–for fear is the opposite of a settled mind. However, with the fear or reverence of the Holy One, one experiences menucha, rest and comfort. ‘And God made them houses,’ teaches of this, for ‘houses’ symbolizes an organized, settled mind. It follows that when they had a settled mind, in awe and reverence toward the Holy One, they had no fear from the decree of Pharaoh.”

To me, this is a deeply perceptive reading on the workings of fear and confidence–one I find to be true in my own spiritual practice. When my mind is scattered and unsettled, I find my breath is shorter, my adrenaline is up, and I am much more susceptible to the unhealthy ways fear can operate within me. That’s true whether I’m walking on a busy street or reading the news on my phone. But when I take the time to enter a state of yishuv hada’at, to settle my mind through meditation or other conscious effort, I generally experience a sense of calm, comfort, and confidence–and, ultimately, a sense of yirat Hashem, reverence for the Creator.

To bring us back to Shifra and Puah, or to our closer ancestors whom we might treat at a historical distance, I find it a wonderful invitation to imagine how these very basic forces of fear, reverence, breathing, adrenaline, attention and awareness operated within them. What kind of self-confidence must they have had to do what they did? What kind of fear might have operated within them, and how did they manage it? When I ask these kinds of questions, I find greater insight in the story than when I treat the characters as heroes on a pedestal.

One of the fundamental teachings of Hasidism is that yetziat mitzrayim, the Exodus, was not merely an historical event. The forces of constraint–physical, psychological, political, spiritual–regularly press inward towards constriction. Egypt, mitzrayim, is that constricted place, and thus, simply to stay alive and able to serve the Holy One, we are constantly leaving Egypt. To be truly, deeply at home is to experience spiritual liberation. And so, to borrow the word of our passage in the Torah, our spiritual practice is here to help us experience ourselves as babayit, at home–in our minds, our bodies, the planet, and the cosmos.

For reflection and conversation:

• Do you have an ancestor, biological or spiritual, who is a hero to you? What, if anything, do you know about their spiritual life? What, if anything, do you imagine they might have done or experienced to enable them to take heroic action?
• In your own life, does your spiritual practice help you feel more settled and at home? If so, how? If not, why not–and is there anything you might want to shift as a result?